COMMENTARY
WISE PASSIVENESS
pieper and wordsworth on the liber al arts
Louis Markos
I
n chapter 47 of his 1998 encyclical letter,
On the Relationship between Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio), Pope John Paul II laments
“that the role of philosophy . . . has changed
in modern culture.” “From universal wisdom
and learning,” he argues, philosophy “has
been gradually reduced to one of the many
fields of human knowledge.” As a result,
traditional philosophy has been replaced
by “forms of rationality [that] are directed
not toward contemplation of truth and the
search for the ultimate goal and meaning
of life; but instead, as ‘instrumental reason,’
they are directed—actually or potentially—
towards the promotion of utilitarian ends,
towards enjoyment or power.”
Sadly, what the pope says here about
philosophy in particular has become increasingly true of the liberal arts in general. Over
the last several decades, American universities have adopted a utilitarian view of
education. This vocational-pragmatic view
has proved deleterious to the centrality and
strength of the liberal arts, particularly such
key humanistic pursuits as literature, philosophy, and narrative history focused on great
men (rather than fact-based, socioeconomic
history). The paradigm shift has manifested
itself in a number of ways: (1) the traditional
general-education core, grounded in the classics of Greece, Rome, and Christian Europe,
is replaced with a cafeteria-style core that
allows students to pick and choose courses
that interest them; (2) the humanities are
downplayed in favor of the social sciences;
(3) non-Western and noncanonical works
are privileged over the Great Books of the
Western intellectual tradition; and (4) the
very status (and existence) of Great Books is
questioned; and ethical, philosophical, and
aesthetic standards of the good, the true, and
the beautiful are deconstructed or dismissed.
To make matters worse, the agencies that
accredit liberal arts colleges and universities
have surrendered themselves to reductive,
statistics-driven methods that squeeze the
life and passion out of the humanities. To
hold up the liberal arts as ends in themselves
Louis Markos is professor in English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and holds the
Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His books include From Achilles to Christ, The Eye of the Beholder: How to
See the World like a Romantic Poet, and On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis.
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that invite students into the Great Conversation, that foster the growth of virtue and
contemplation, and that help shape morally
self-regulating citizens who love God and
their neighbor would be considered unutterably naive by the social scientists who run
our nation’s accreditation agencies. If the liberal arts cannot be justified along pragmatic
lines, if their impact cannot be measured
numerically, converted into flow charts, and
backed up by aggregate data, then they have
no place in the modern university.
In the end, when our once-fine institutions of higher learning have abdicated all
responsibility to protect and propagate the
best that has been known and thought in the
world (to use Matthew Arnold’s trenchant
phrase), when they have, to borrow a line
from Yeats, dried the marrow from the bone,
then will they become what they are already
fast becoming: expensive vocational schools
draped in whatever politically correct garb is
fashionable at the moment.
Although my language may be stronger
than most, I am hardly the first professor to
warn against the slow decay of the liberal arts.
The problem that I diagnose above is wellknown to critics inside and outside academia
who care about the intellectual, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic formation of the young.
And many of those critics have mounted
vigorous defenses of the liberal arts. Unfortunately, in doing so, too many have relied on
the language and ethos of utilitarianism. We
need the liberal arts, we are told, because they
provide students with critical skills that will
help them to survive and thrive in their more
practical majors. Thus the study of Latin is
praised because it calls for intense, quantifiable rigor and yields pragmatic results, such
as the ability to recognize the roots of medical and legal terminology.
Whereas such arguments are helpful
and necessary, what the modern academy
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desperately needs are arguments that present the study of literature, history, and
philosophy—that is to say, the passionate
pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty as
it has manifested itself in the most lasting
works of the human imagination, in the rise
and fall of kingdoms, and in man’s search for
meaning in the cosmos—as a good-in-itself,
not merely as a training ground for medicine,
law, and business. More than that, the “passive” life of imagination and contemplation
must be held up as having a value equal to
the active life of “hard work” that dominates
the marketplace.
Enter Josef Pieper (1904–1997), a German Catholic philosopher whose work has
received growing (and much deserved)
attention and praise over the last decade.
A Thomist who wrote often on the virtues,
Pieper was a great apologist for the life of
contemplation, a life that the master of
his master (Aristotle) considered to be the
highest and happiest. In Leisure, the Basis of
Culture (1948), Pieper makes great strides
toward defending the liberal arts by opening
his reader’s eyes to a single, rather shocking
etymology. The word school comes from a
Greek word (schole) that means—believe it
or not—“leisure.”
In book 10, chapter 7 of the Nicomachean
Ethics—the very chapter where Aristotle
argues that the contemplative life is the
happiest—the thinker whom Aquinas refers
to simply as the Philosopher makes a stunning statement: “we are busy (a-schole or
“not-at-leisure”) that we may have leisure
(schole), and make war that we may live in
peace.” In sharp contrast to the modern man,
who takes a vacation so he may work harder
when he gets back to the office, Aristotle,
one of the hardest-working philosophers the
world has ever known, says that it is for the
sake of the vacation that we work at all. Of
course, in making this distinction, Pieper
WISE PASSIVENESS
knows that he will be criticized by those who
equate vacations with frivolity and leisure
with laziness. Worse yet, he knows that he
risks invoking the wrath of Christians who
see no difference between leisure and the
deadly sin of sloth.
In response, Pieper contends that sloth
(acedia, idleness, spiritual torpor) does not
manifest itself as a yearning for leisure but a
rejection of our full, God-given dignity and
potential. The opposite of acedia is not hard
work but cheerful affirmation. The modern
workaholic who uses endless busy-ness to
shield himself from having to meditate on
God’s purpose for his life is in far greater danger of sloth than the man who reads a book
of poetry under a tree and opens his mind
to the beauty of the words and the power of
the images. Just as the purpose of the Sabbath was not to draw the Israelites away from
meaningful work but to draw them closer to
God, so the true purpose of festivals is not
to drag us downward toward the beast (by
means of unrestrained license) but to lift us
upward toward the angels (by means of intimate fellowship and refined joy).
In like manner, an intensely leisurely study
of the liberal arts, far from vitiating our spirit
and vigor, makes us more human, more
fully alive to the telos (purposeful end) for
which God created us. Living and writing in
mid-twentieth-century Europe, Pieper was
sharply aware of what happens when a totalitarian work state comes to view its citizens as
proletarians, as faceless cogs in an industrial
machine that demands quantifiable work of
all its laborers, whether their collar be blue
or white.
Leisure, like the liberal arts, rescues us
from the horrors of mass identity. It restores
to us our soul, our uniqueness, our individual
purpose. It broadens our dignity beyond the
useful, and impels us, not to control, but to
know. Truly may it be said of the liberal arts
what C. S. Lewis says of friendship in The
Four Loves: that though they have no survival
value, they give value to survival. We seek leisure, just as we study the liberal arts, because
we are human; and, when we do so, we
become less like Camus’s Sisyphus (defined
by Pieper as a worker who is “chained to his
labor without rest, and without inner satisfaction”) and more like the ladies and gentlemen
we were meant to be.
Between the modernist, progressive, ultimately Marxist philosophy of work and the
traditional, conservative, Judeo-Christian
philosophy of leisure there stretches a great
gulf. According to the former, even thinking itself is a form of work. Knowledge is to
be gained by an active pursuit, defined by
effort and confined within the spatiotemporal limits of our world. According to the
latter, true insight and wisdom come from
a passive, intuitive reception to truth. Our
mind, having been prepared by relaxation
and tranquility (rather than assertion and
struggle), grasps—or, better, is grasped
by—the eternal moment. Though the Bible
calls on us to be good stewards of our time,
resources, and talents, an excessive focus on
hectic, stressful work too often leaves us with
stony hearts unable to receive.
All this is not to say that the traditional,
leisurely study of literature, history, and philosophy does not take effort. It takes a great
deal of effort. But the effort is not directed
toward narrow utilitarian or vocational ends,
and its goal is not to reduce, calculate, and
quantify. It seeks not facts but truth, not
analysis but synthesis, not to figure out but
to understand, not to master but to know,
not to do but to be.
It is true that leisure and the liberal arts
seek, like Buddhism, detachment from the
restlessness and fever of the world and a sense
of inner harmony and balance. But there is
this vital difference: the full Judeo-Christian
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understanding of leisure, together with the
Platonic-Aristotelian and medieval-Catholic
study of the liberal arts, ever exists in the
presence of joy—and not just joy in the
abstract but the joy of touching an eternal,
transcendent truth that can be both studied
and known. There is something metaphysical and supernatural that lies outside of our
self and our world, and that something can
be apprehended only by those who prepare
their hearts and minds to seek after what
both Plato and Aquinas called the beatific
vision. To enjoy and to immerse oneself in
aesthetic beauty, to contemplate the greater
patterns of human history, to meditate
upon the timeless questions that define us
as human beings, is not only to live that life
that Aristotle defined as the happiest but to
proceed, if slowly and tentatively, up Plato’s
rising path toward those eternal, changeless
Forms that Augustine located in the mind
of God.
In working out his definition, Pieper makes
frequent reference to the Greek and medieval philosophers, and he is right to do so.
And yet, strangely, he makes no reference to
a group of poets who discerned in the overrationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment the same dangers as Pieper observed
in the twentieth-century totalitarian work
states of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I
speak of the British Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge in particular, who
boldly sought to reclaim the importance of
imagination and intuition and to revive a
more subjective, holistic view of nature that
would allow intercourse between the mind
of man, the physical universe around us, and
the spirit that interpenetrates both.
Although Pieper makes no mention of the
Romantics, Wordsworth’s brief lyrical poem
“Expostulation and Reply” offers a remarkably succinct gloss on Pieper’s work-versusleisure thesis. Indeed, the debate that lies
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at the core of the Wordsworth poem reads
like a dramatization of the distinction Pieper
makes between ratio (“the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching,
abstracting, refining, and concluding”) and
intellectus (“the ability of ‘simply looking’
[simplex intuitus], to which the truth presents
itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye”).
“Expostulation and Reply,” which first
appeared in the collection that Wordsworth
wrote in collaboration with Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), allows us to eavesdrop on
a friendly dialogue between the Romantic William Wordsworth and his more
Enlightenment-minded friend Matthew.
Though the poem ultimately champions
William’s less systematic, leisure-loving
view, it is structured, ironically, like a formal
debate.
Rather than begin with an introduction
of the debaters and their topic, Wordsworth
plunges in head first, allowing Matthew
three stanzas to present his case:
“Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?
“Where are your books?—that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! Up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
“You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!”
What initiates the debate between the
two friends is Matthew’s consternation at
the seemingly lackadaisical attitude of William. From Matthew’s perspective, William’s
WISE PASSIVENESS
indulgence in leisure is simply a mask for
laziness. Matthew discerns neither effort nor
purpose in William’s passive musings: his
slothful friend has wasted away his entire
morning daydreaming on a rock when he
could have been learning valuable lessons
from studying books.
At first glance, it would appear that Matthew, not William, is the ideal apologist for
the liberal arts. After all, Matthew, like a
good Classics professor or Scholastic philosopher, seems to believe that the reading and
studying of old books marks the only safe
and proper road to truth and illumination.
The analyzing, interpreting, and critiquing
of authoritative texts, Matthew argues, not
indolent woolgathering, represents the correct method for attaining wisdom. But there
is a flaw in Matthew’s defense of old books,
and he exposes that flaw when he counsels
William to “drink the spirit breathed / From
dead men to their kind.”
The problem with the utilitarian, socialscience-driven philosophy of work, even
when it disguises itself under the label of
the humanities, is precisely that it views
the Great Books as dead artifacts to be
embalmed rather than as living beings to be
grappled with. There seems to be little joy
or passion in Matthew’s defense of books; he
treats them more as collections of data than
as repositories of wisdom. He certainly does
not commune with them in the way that
William communes with nature. William’s
drinking in of the natural beauty around him
suggests a receptivity to goodness, truth, and
beauty that Matthew lacks. Of course, the
problem is that Matthew cannot conceive
that William is drinking in wisdom through
his senses; all Matthew sees in William is a
relaxed, careless approach to learning that
betrays a streak of idleness and a false sense of
specialness. And if William were to contend
that it is right for him, as a child of nature,
to take solace and pleasure in the wonders of
the natural world . . . Matthew would likely
not understand that either.
But that is no matter to William. Despite
Matthew’s taunts, William remains in a state
of peace and joy. Having allowed Matthew
his say, Wordsworth the poet, after briefly
establishing the setting of the dialogue,
presents us with William the debater’s boldly
gentle response:
One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:
“The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.
“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
“Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
“—Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.”
Whereas Matthew would gain knowledge
by active study (ratio), William would gain
it by passive embrace (intellectus). After all,
he asserts, we cannot prevent our senses
from taking in the myriad splendors that
surround us. Sensations rush upon us from
all directions, enough to fill eye and ear to
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overflowing. So often the things that really
matter come to us not after long and arduous study but in a flash of insight: direct,
spontaneous, unpremeditated. Well, not
exactly. Although they come in a flash, we
can only apprehend that flash if our mind
has been made receptive through leisurely
contemplation.
In his response to Matthew, William
speaks of invisible Powers that press themselves upon us, Powers that we must open
our minds to receive. We need not seek them,
William makes clear, but we do need to be
ready to receive them when they appear.
We need to stop and listen, to cease doing
and commence seeing. What Wordsworth
advocates in his poem is almost identical to
what Pieper calls for in Leisure, the Basis of
Culture. Indeed, an alternate title for Pieper’s
book would be “Wise Passiveness,” a key
Wordsworthian phrase that might best be
defined as an active focusing that prepares
the mind to receive passively. As I noted
above, this kind of learning bears much
similarity to Buddhism; however, as with the
Catholic Pieper, the Anglican Wordsworth
factors in an essential element of joy and
directs his musings toward a divine Presence
that transcends both nature and the self.
By no means is William dreaming his
time away as Matthew claims in the opening
stanza. His quest for knowledge is as serious
and intentional as Matthew’s; it is merely
carried out in a different manner. In fact,
Matthew is even wrong in his assertion that
William is alone. Though he may seem alone
to those who lack eyes to see and ears to hear,
he is, in reality, engaged in an actively passive dialogue with the whole mighty sum of
speaking things.
And the same goes for the literature student who sits under a tree and reads an epic
by Homer or a tragedy by Shakespeare or a
sonnet by Keats. The poem is not a thing to
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be analyzed, categorized, and filed on a shelf.
It is to be received both as an individual
expression of beauty and humanity and as
a single stanza of that great and timeless
poem that mankind has been writing for
the last four millennia. The history student
who reads Thucydides or Livy or the AngloSaxon chronicle takes part in an intensely
human journey; the philosophy student who
reads Augustine, Kant, and Kierkegaard
participates in an equally human conversation. And as they do, they build up within
themselves reserves of tenacity and strength,
tranquility and wonder, resolution and perseverance, independence and freedom.
Without such people, human civilization—
always a tenuous thing—cannot flourish.
Without such students and professors, universities as universities cannot continue to
function. Without such citizens, democracy
cannot long survive. Naturalism, materialism, scientism, nihilism—all are dead ends
that confine us to a dark, claustrophobic
world. Though the face of utilitarianism
tends to be more benign, it too leads us down
a reductive, antihumanistic path that seals us
off from revelation, from wisdom, and from
purpose.
Pragmatism is closely allied to utilitarianism, and, in chapter 89 of On the Relationship
between Faith and Reason, John Paul II identifies pragmatism as one of a number of modern and postmodern schools of thought that
threaten to sever us from the living Tradition
of philosophy. That is so because pragmatism
offers “a one-dimensional vision of the human
being, a vision that excludes the great ethical
dilemmas and the existential analyses of the
meaning of suffering and sacrifice, of life and
death.” I would propose that only a revitalization of the liberal arts as ends-in-themselves
that draw students into an active-passive
conversation with the past can restore the
three-dimensional vision we have lost.